Recreating and Rewriting The Jungle Book 1967
A lot was riding on the company’s 19th animated feature. In 1961, 101 Dalmations had
been a huge box-office success, but the next film, The Sword in the Stone (1963), was
not. Disney himself was concerned at this dip. As his company had diversified in the
Fifties – into theme parks, television series, live-action films – he’d become less hands on with the feature animations. But after the commercial disappointment of The Sword in the Stone, he resolved to keep a close eye on the next big-screen cartoon.
Disney had already OK’d an idea from Bill Peet, one of his long-standing animators and storymen, for an adaptation of Kipling’s book – he’d told the company’s all-powerful founder that the British author’s Raj-era tales offered a wealth of potential for Disney-friendly animal characters. But according to Sibley, when the boss came to read the script, “what he found was that the team headed up by Bill Peet had come up with quite a sombre, dark, serious story – much more serious than any films they’d done in animation since the days of Pinocchio”. An “alarmed” Disney had “a bit of a confrontation with Bill Peet”. The original story was junked and Peet duly left the studio in 1964.
Ever the perfectionist, Disney went back to scratch. He called in another vintage Disney storyman, Larry Clemmons, and a new team of creatives. His opening gambit was “to give a copy of Kipling’s book to Larry and his colleagues”, says Sibley. “Disney said, ‘the first thing I want you to do is not to read it!’ And they started working with the characters that Peet had created in his original treatment, but creating a much more upbeat, lively, freer, light-in-mood film.” Another casualty of this restart was the original score by songwriter Terry Gilkyson.
This was part of the Disney method: have the songs written very early in the film-making process. Says Sibley, “In Mary Poppins, for example, nearly all of the songs we now know were set down long before the final script was ever arrived at. They were decided upon as key points in the movie, around which the rest of the story would be fitted in.”
Only one of Gilkyson’s songs survived the cull: the Oscar-nominated The Bare Necessities. To fill the musical void, Disney called in the Sherman Brothers, Richard and Robert. They had worked for the Disney company since 1958, but had hit musical pay dirt with their songs for 1964’s Mary Poppins. That soundtrack won the Shermans two Academy Awards, and with Feed the Birds they created Disney’s personal favourite song.
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